“What?” she asked him. “Who has done this to you?”
Long ago, Jabez, having wondered if when a heart breaks it snaps like a dry twig or more raggedly like a green branch, or rends reluctantly like the tearing of strong linen, discovered that in fact the human heart never breaks at all. Its tragedy is that it belongs to our flesh, and however lacerated and swollen and bruised, it goes on loving, it cannot let go, being offered neither the respite nor the welcome end of breaking.
“She’s leaving me. Oh, it’s so painful! So painful! So painful! She’s going.” He sobbed out the words incoherently. “Oh, God, it just hurts so much, so much, so much!”
He collapsed into a paroxysm of weeping, and Ember waited, quite still, while the tempest shook and racked and wrenched the frame of him.
Eventually the choking sobs that tore him abated, until he sat trembling, his breath shuddering and catching, his hands covering his face.
Then Ember lifted the corner of her apron and, removing his hands one after the other from his face, wiped away the tears without speaking. He did not look at her, but shook his head, hopelessly, deep tremors of grief running through his whole body.
“Oh dear,” he said at last. “Oh, dear, dear me; what am I going to do? Whatever am I going to do? Oh, dear …” In utter misery he wrung his hands together, and then his face twisted as he collapsed again into helpless weeping.
“I can’t!” he cried out through the tears. “I can’t go through it again! I can’t lose her! Oh, God, help me. Oh, God, what can I do?”
Ember held him, rocked him gently, talked soothing nonsense to him, stroked his hands. She sat by him until, empty and wrecked, he was still. Then, “Lie down, Jabez,” she said, “while I make up the fire.”
She put a cushion to pillow his head and made him lie down on the couch, stood in pity watching his body involuntarily contracting into a tight ball as the torture of grief started again, and his features distorted once more into a mask of agony. He turned his face away into the privacy of the cushion.
Ember frowned, in a small, densely concentrated space of thought. Then her habitual expression of clarity and determination returned. She left him, went to her room, and pulled the blanket from her bed, brought it downstairs and tucked it around him. She knelt at the hearth to light the fire, then got to her feet and stood by the sofa again to look at him, curled up in desolation, his eyes open but gazing without hope at nothing. Ember bent and stroked the silver hair, tenderly molding her hand to the contours of his head and neck.
“You just rest now, my lamb,” she said. “Get you some sleep. It’ll be all right. You’ll not lose her. ’Tis entirely of God that lies between you and she. ’Tis not a passing fancy, ’tis eternal. Take comfort now and rest. It will be well, Jabez, I promise you.”
She regarded him a moment longer, then treading quietly she left the room, found her coat and scarf, fed the hens and locked them in against the visits of the fox, shut up the garden shed and the workshop, fetched her hat and stick, and set off to walk to Southarbour.
It had turned midnight when Esme, finishing off the updating of her pastoral lists on her computer, was startled by a determined knocking at her door. She switched on the porch light and drew back the bolt.
“Good gracious, Ember, whatever is it?” she asked, astonished as she opened the door and beheld the small and furious bundle of rage wrapped in winter woollies on her doorstep. “Come in!”
“Thank you, I will,” snapped Ember, continuing as she stepped into the hall. “What do they teach you in these Christian chapels? Anything? Nothing? Have you no shame? Have you no pity? Have you no wisdom? No understanding? No insight? Do they not teach you that love brings responsibility?”
She stood, bristling, glaring at Esme, her obsidian eyes bright with anger.
Esme experienced the familiar quailing in her abdomen, the urge to run, lie, get help. She wondered if there was any place in the world safe from old ladies.
“What are you talking about, Ember?” she asked when the gunfire of questions had stopped. “Come into the kitchen. Let me make you some coffee. How did you get here? It’s awfully late. Come on.”
She let Ember follow her into the kitchen, filled the electric kettle, and switched it on to boil.
“I walked.”
Esme turned and looked at her in amazement. “Walked? Why, Ember, you’re eighty-six! It’s seven miles to Wiles Green from here! It must have taken you forever!”
Esme often felt that Ember’s eyes might almost as well have had sound effects. Just now they looked as though they should be spitting and crackling like faulty electricals.
“Yes,” said Ember, as Esme set a mug of coffee down in front of her. “But it’ll be a lot quicker getting back, because you’ll be taking me in that car of yours when you come over to sort out the mess you’ve made of Jabez.”
Esme looked completely taken aback. “Jabez? I have?” She stared at Ember, and then, slowly, comprehension dawned on her face. “Because of the appointment in Surrey?” she asked, horrified.
“Surrey? Where’s that? What’s the place like? Is it far away?”
Sitting down opposite Ember at the table, Esme told her about the appointment, the opportunity, the letter. She explained all that it meant, able somehow to put into words to Ember what Jabez would never understand—the desire to make something of herself, to do well, to get past the humiliation of other people’s pity.
“I hadn’t really thought through what it might mean to Jabez,” she confessed. “I honestly don’t know where things are going with him and me. I feel as though I’ve known him forever, although it hasn’t really been very long, and I can see he loves me dearly, but—well—he’s not a very demonstrative man, is he? In any case, just suppose Jabez and I were together—and that still is presuming something beyond where we seem to be right now—could he not come with me? There must be bicycles and lawnmowers to fix in Surrey, mustn’t there? Women move to go with their men. These days the men are learning to move with the women.”
Ember considered this, frowning ferociously at the table.
“I believe,” she said then, thoughtfully, “in the freedom of living beings. Not only human beings, mind you, but all beings. I believe we should live in ways that respect the freedom of all beings. And protect it from those that have no such respect. Protection brings limiting of course. Locking things in at night from the fox, maybe. It’s a complicated thing. Be that as it may, among human beings, I believe in the freedom of women as well as the freedom of men. I was married but a year or two, and I never missed him when he was gone. I didn’t want a man cluttering up my life. Mistaking me for his mother and clamoring for the needs of his belly and his bed. Confounded nuisances are men. Meeting Jabez Ferrall was quite a surprise to me. He don’t flirt with anyone, he can think, he lives by his principles, he expects to do his own cooking, and he don’t expect either of us to clean his house—had I a-been twenty years younger he might have caused me to revise my habits of mind. I’m not sending you to sleep with my chuntering on, am I?”
Esme smiled at her. “Go on.”
“So I believe in your freedom, Esme. I can see you’re an ambitious woman. You have an urge to get on in life. But I think I see also in the woman you are, something that understands simplicity; how precious it is—how you have to work for it and struggle for it and defend it in this day and age. And then again, you’re a spiritual woman; so am I. And if you’ll forgive the tedious hearken-to-me of an old woman to a young one, I believe I got to remind you that simplicity is the gateway to spiritual living. You can’t have one without the other. That’s why you love Jabez—because love him you do, my dear; and I think you’d find yourself in a pretty pickle lost in the barren desert of all they streets and cars without Jabez Ferrall’s bicycle shed for a refuge. You was hungry enough in your soul when you first found him. Am I not right?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” Esme sighed. She stirred. “I suppose so.”
&n
bsp; “You got to see, there’s something you are overlooking in Jabez. He won’t transplant. You might as well try to put a sixty-eight-year-old tree in a clay pot, take it with you to this Surrey, stick it in the flower bed, and hope it’ll be all right. Jabez is not just passing through Wiles Green. He was born there. His parents were born there. It’s his home. His father was born in the bedroom where Jabez sleeps of a night. Jabez brought his bride to bed in that cottage, and she bore his children there, three of them—two of them grown and gone into the world, and his baby girl buried under the apple tree in his orchard there. He nursed his wife in that cottage when she was sick and ’twas from there that they carried out her body. You might as well take a fancy to tag the moon along with you on the end of a string as try to uproot Jabez from his cottage. The kind of men you mean that move about the world, and the professional women who keep them moving—some of them are sophisticated, some of them are unhappy, some of them are like air plants that thrive on any rock where they perch. But they’ve forgotten, the whole modern world has forgotten, the meaning of home. And maybe your Jesus was much to blame. Itchy feet, that man. What can you expect, born in a stable, dropped like a bit of baggage at the journey’s end. Hardly knew where he belonged, I should think.”
“Well, not in this world, anyway,” said Esme. “But, thank you, Ember. If I’m honest I hadn’t liked to look at it too closely, really. I can’t see that I’ve got many options. I have tried to talk to Jabez about the new job, but he just blanks me out.”
She cupped her hands around the warm mug of coffee, gazing thoughtfully into space. “You’re right. I do love him. We must surely be able to sort something out.”
“Then it may be all down to you, my dear. I told you before, Jabez needs a bit of a shove sometimes. Doesn’t like to push himself forward or intrude where he’s not wanted.”
“Not that kind of man,” said Esme, with a smile, downing the rest of her coffee. “Now, what about tonight? Are you staying here? Am I taking you home?”
“Taking me home,” replied Ember firmly. “He’s not fit to be left alone at present. Almost made hisself sick sobbing this night.”
“What?” Esme stared at Ember in horror. “For goodness sake! Okay, let’s go. I’m ready, I’ll just get my coat.”
Ember looked at her speculatively.
“What?” Esme asked her.
“I’ll just use your lavatory if I may,” Ember said, coyly. It rang a little odd, but it passed Esme by—“Oh, I’m sorry, I should have asked you before,” she said. “There’s one downstairs and one upstairs.”
“Upstairs, please,” Ember replied decidedly and headed purposefully for the stairs.
While Ember was in the bathroom, Esme went back into her study to tidy away confidential files and shut down her computer. Then she went out to put her bike away in the garage, returned to lock the back door, and find her car keys, after which Ember appeared on the stairs, clutching her coat about her, ready for the outdoors.
“’Tis cold tonight,” she remarked conversationally. “I hope the blossom don’t get frosted.”
Esme felt concerned about Jabez, but she enjoyed the drive to Wiles Green, the stars shining down from a clear sky until she lost sight of them as the road dipped down between the trees and hedges, and the moonlight flicked barred on her car through the branches overhead. There coming up from the ditch her headlights picked out a fox sliding silently into the undergrowth, and alongside the field gate the striped face of a badger watching them go by.
When they reached Wiles Green and turned off the road, Ember suggested they park the car in the lane—there might be too little space to turn around in the yard with the way Jabez had left the truck parked, not expecting Esme to come tonight, she explained—and reassured Esme they would be in nobody’s way. This seemed sensible enough, so they left the car in the lane and walked together along the path around to the kitchen door.
“Freezing in here, stove’s out,” muttered Ember as she stepped into the house. “I left him in the living room,” she added.
Esme looked toward the door that led into the house. No lights had been turned on, but in the living room maybe there was a glow of firelight she could see. With a sudden feeling of apprehension, guilty at the unhappiness she had caused, she went hesitantly through from the kitchen into the room beyond.
Bright moonlight shone into the room and found the silver lights of his hair. He was sitting with Ember’s blanket pulled around his shoulders, gazing at the glowing remains of the fire, very still. Even in the kindness of shadow and firelight, his face looked haggard and lost and old.
“Jabez?”
He looked up in amazement. “Esme!” He stared at her. “What time is it?” he asked, bewildered.
“Nearly two o’clock, I think. Ember came to find me. She said you were really upset.”
He moved his hand in a vague gesture of deprecation. “I’m all right. What do you mean she came to find you? Walked, you mean?”
Esme nodded. “Yes. It’s taken her hours. Jabez, can I put the lamp on? I can hardly see you.”
“Of course,” he said. As she turned back to him from the light switch, he was blinking from the comparative brightness, and then as he adjusted to it, she looked at him more closely, his eyes baggy and bloodshot, his face ravaged from weeping.
“Jabez, you look exhausted! You look absolutely done in. Oh, I’m so sorry about what I said; I didn’t mean to hurt you so. It’ll be all right, we can work something out.”
Ember appeared in the door behind her.
“Exhausted? He’s not the only one. And if he’s tired, then it’s time he was in bed. I’m going that way myself. You, too, my love. I’ve brought your night things.”
“I beg your pardon?” Esme was beginning to feel out of her depth.
“I brought your night things from your bed at the parsonage. Have some sense, Esme. Look at the state of him. I’m tired, you’re tired, he looks like he died last week. What did you hope to do? Try and have a conversation with him? You’ll have to save that till the morning.”
“But where will I sleep?” said Esme.
Ember looked at her very hard. “Well, not in my bed, for that’s where I shall be in five minutes. You can work something out between you, I should imagine.”
Jabez pushed his hand, trembling with weariness, across his face and through his hair. “I’ll sleep on the sofa,” he murmured.
“I don’t think so,” retorted Ember, shortly. “You’ve let the kitchen stove go out, and you don’t look like you’re about to spring to your feet and build up the fire beside you. I certainly am not planning to forage for firewood at such an hour of the night. And I’ll want my blanket for my own bed, thank you. Seven miles I’ve walked for you this night, Jabez Ferrall. I’ve fetched her back for you. I’ve filched her night things out of her bedroom to satisfy your modesty. Pull yourself together! Think of a better way to keep warm.”
With that she unbuttoned her coat and produced from within its folds Esme’s nightdress, which she tossed onto the floor at his feet, dragged the blanket off his shoulders, and trailed it behind her as she clumped up the stairs. They heard the decisive closing of her door.
Jabez dropped his face into his hands. “Oh, my God,” Esme heard his groan, muffled.
She couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, for goodness sake, Jabez, it’s not so bad! We’re grown-up people. I’m forty-five, you’re sixty-eight, I don’t suppose it will wreak havoc with our innocence to share a bed together, will it? For one night?”
He didn’t move.
She stepped closer to him to pick up her nightdress, and as she stooped she put her hand on his knee. “Please, Jabez. Let’s go to bed.”
He rubbed his face and his eyes, then put his hand down to squeeze hers gently where it lay on his knee. He looking entirely dazed, bewildered with weariness and emotional exhaustion.
“Jabez?” she said.
Jabez sighed, a long, deep, shuddering sigh. He tu
rned his head to look at her, and Esme had a sense of him drawing upon resources deep within, summoning the last dregs of energy to face this thing properly, say what he wanted to say. She knelt down on the floor beside him, waiting for him to frame what was inside him. His eyes dark and deep held hers, serious—all his soul looking out at her there.
“Esme, I understand the common sense of it. ’Tis late, I’m worn out, here are you, there’s one bed. But it isn’t as simple as that, is it? What’s held out here is a possibility to be one. What Ember has in mind, and what you and me are not saying, is this isn’t about sleeping, not one bit. It’s about you and me making love.”
He smiled then, and lifted his hand to her face, his fingertips delicately tracing the outlines of her cheek. “Tired I may be, but if I let my mind dwell on that, I don’t feel very sleepy, and I think you may know by now, I wouldn’t need much persuading.”
He hesitated a moment, then continued, finding the courage to be honest:
“I been so lonely, Esme. At night in bed sometimes I could have wept for loneliness. Just for a cuddle, to feel someone warm beside me. Some nights I been lying here hugging the pillow for some comfort. I been so terribly lonely. And I love you so much. It seems like forever I’ve longed for you and loved you. Only I never dared offer myself, because I’ve got nothing to give you, and I couldn’t see how I could fit in with your life. What we’re talking about now is what I’ve dreamed for, yearned for, wanted more than I can find the words to say. Don’t you know that? Surely you could see?
“But for all that, I got to say, I can’t really approve of this. Love is something faithful, something that endures. If what you’re planning is to move away from Wiles Green and leave me, then I think we’d do wrong to look for any kind of union more than the friendship we already have—and always will have. Oh, my dearest! You must know, my body’s yours, and my love, and all that’s mine to give, if you’ll have me; but I just think it should be not at all or forever. We got to sort ourselves out first, before we get into this. We got to have an understanding. Esme, I can’t reach out for something that’s only a mirage, a union for only one night. It’s too important to me. I love you too much for that. It would be unbearable. It would break my heart.”
The Clear Light of Day Page 21
